Month: June 2016

Enlarge / Little ol' headphone jacks causing a big ol' fuss. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

As the rumors that the next iPhone will drop the 3.5mm headphone jack have intensified, I’ve been keeping tabs on the specific argument that Daring Fireball’s John Gruber made yesterday: that removing the headphone jack from the iPhone is the modern-day equivalent of removing the floppy drive from the iMac in the late '90s. It caused some pain at the time, but it was the way things were moving anyway and in the grand scheme of things it was a smart thing to do.

The people on the “get rid of the headphone jack” side of the debate normally choose some version of this position as the justification that the jack is “old” and so getting rid of it represents “progress.” And the fact of the matter is that Apple has been pretty good at this kind of progress over the years, picking up new technologies like USB and SSDs and dropping aging ones like the DVD drive well before those technologies had gone (or ceased to be) mainstream.

But the headphone jack is not the floppy drive. It’s not the 30-pin connector. It’s not the DVD drive. It’s not even USB Type-C. It’s not, in other words, directly comparable to all those other times when Apple has been “right” to remove or change something, both because of the ubiquity of the headphone jack and the quality of the supposed replacements.

(credit: YouTube—Ricky Dillon)

A lot of YouTubers are getting book deals now, including many of the big names like Tyler Oakley, PewDiePie, Miranda Sings, and Shane Dawson. It's easy to dismiss these books as money-grabs by publishers desperate to gain new customers or fame-grabs by YouTubers who want another thing to put their faces on. But these books aren't all terrible. YouTubers have produced some interesting stories that are (believe it or not) best told via the written word rather than on video.

How the publishing industry found YouTube

The YouTuber book trend began a couple of years ago. One of the first YouTubers to cross over to the printed page was Hannah Hart from My Drunk Kitchen. In August 2014, she released My Drunk Kitchen: A Guide to Eating, Drinking, and Going with Your Gut, a part cookbook-and-cocktail-guide, part personal story book. Quick to follow in her footsteps was Rosanna Pansino; The Nerdy Nummies Cookbook she released is based off her YouTube cooking show where she makes Pokemon Pokeball cake pops, light saber popsicles, and more.

While both Hart and Pansino are arguably two of the most popular YouTubers, with more than eight million subscribers combined, it's refreshing to know that the big guns are not the only ones writing books. The Korean food star Emily Kim, better known as Maangchi, released her first cookbook Maangchi's Real Korean Cooking in 2015. Kim is an interesting case: unlike the teenagers and early-twentysomething YouTuber stars who get all the press, Kim uploaded her first YouTube video as an adult back in 2007. After seeing others try (and fail) to create authentic Korean dishes, she decided to show them how to make the dishes of her country correctly. "Korean food is so new to many people, so we really needed to start from the very first step of explaining what Korean food is, and what it tastes like," Kim told Ars in an e-mail.

Don't avoid me because I'm lethal.

File this in the "department of unintended consequences." Blizzard has announced that it is removing the "Avoid this player" feature from online shooter Overwatch, partly because it was isolating players that opponents thought were playing too well.

In an announcement earlier today, Blizzard said the Prefer/Avoid player feature system "was designed with the best intentions; however, it's not currently performing in a way that we feel is healthy for the game." While the ability to note that you prefer beneficial players is working as intended, the ability to avoid "problem" players "has impacted the matchmaker in [a] negative way and led to some very poor player experiences."

Game Director Jeff Kaplan went into much more detail on the change (and matchmaking in general) in a long post about the matter yesterday. The following anecdote about what happened to a highly skilled Widowmaker player explains the situation beautifully, so we'll just quote it here in full:

CBS

Reese and Finch puzzle out a problem, with help from the Machine.

4 more images in gallery

It's rare for a television series about technology to get anything right about how computers work, let alone how hackers do their jobs. But in a pop culture landscape flooded with shows like CSI: Cyber and Scorpion, the CBS show Person of Interest stood out as smart, relevant, and mostly clueful about how networked devices actually function. Last night marked the final episode in its five-year run, ending a plot arc about the birth of two artificial intelligences, the ethical Machine and the ruthless Samaritan. Audiences were left with a vision of an ambiguous new future, where we can't just put our powerful new surveillance and machine learning technologies back in the box. We have to figure out how to make them tools for justice, rather than conformity and oppression.

When Person of Interest first started in 2011, it focused mostly on corruption in the NYPD and the nebulous "intelligence community" that trained super-ninja character Reese—and then burned him, badly. Living on the streets, half-mad with PTSD, Reese (Jim Caviezel) is rescued by a mysterious, wealthy hacker named Finch (Michael Emerson). In the darkened stacks of an abandoned library, Finch has set up a high-tech surveillance operation designed to save the lives of "ordinary people" the government "doesn't care about." Finch's only companion, other than Reese, is a mysterious AI he built called the Machine. Locked behind government firewalls, the Machine has one backdoor for communicating with Finch: when its predictive algorithms determine someone is about to experience violence, as a victim or perpetrator, the Machine transmits that person's social security number to Finch via payphone. During the first season, Finch and Reese team up with NYPD detectives Carter (Taraji Henson) and Fusco (Kevin Chapman) to stop that violence wherever they can. Carter, who is former military, is willing to help them because she still believes in making the world safer. Fusco is such a dirty cop that he's vulnerable to blackmail. This ragtag gang of idealists and cynics somehow comes together to form one of the most memorable crime-fighting teams in recent TV history. Their secret weapon is always the Machine, whose sensorium is made up of every surveillance device in the country, and whose mind encompasses every form of personal data you could possibly imagine.

The Machine remained a shadowy unknown in those early days, as the team brought down a notorious group of dirty cops known as "HR," captured New York's most dangerous criminal mastermind, and tried to prevent the government from killing everyone who knows about the Machine. But then we met Root (Amy Acker), a deadly hacker as brilliant as Finch, whose only goal is to set the Machine free. She doesn't care how many people she has to kill to do it. Root believes humans are mostly running "bad code," and that the Machine will prevent us from destroying ourselves and the world. Root also sees the Machine in far more human terms than Finch and Reese ever did; she refers to the Machine as "she," and describes the Machine as having intense feelings of loss and betrayal because of Finch. Gradually, we come to understand that Finch has built so many safety mechanisms into the Machine that it literally cannot remember who it is from one day to the next. Finch has created a life form, but he's stunting its growth. Root wants to make sure the Machine is able to become an adult, as it were.

Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is nearing the finish line. (credit: Boeing)

The last human to command a space shuttle stood outside Boeing’s main office building in southeast Houston Wednesday morning, speaking effusively about the company’s Starliner spacecraft, when it began to rain. But as sometimes happens in this humid Gulf coast city, sunshine persisted even at it rained. Perhaps we should step under one of the building’s awnings, Chris Ferguson suggested—to escape the rain and the Sun.

The weather offered an apt metaphor for Boeing’s recent fortunes in aerospace. The company has a big piece of every single one of NASA’s human spaceflight programs. It’s also the prime contractor of the Space Launch System’s core stage as well as for International Space Station operations, and Boeing is one two participants in the commercial crew program to deliver astronauts to the space station.

But clouds loom, too. SpaceX and Blue Origin have begun to demonstrate the viability of reusable rockets, leading to questions about the affordability of large, expendable rockets like the SLS. NASA will also likely drop funding for the station in 2024, or 2028 at the latest, and as the space agency moves on to cislunar space it is not clear Boeing will be the prime contractor on NASA’s next orbital outpost. Finally, Boeing’s Starliner is in a tight race with SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft to be the first to reach the launch pad for commercial crew in roughly two years.

According to a testing company called Emissions Analytics, many diesel vehicles on the road in the European Union are emitting much more nitrogen oxide (NO_x) than expected at temperatures below 18 degrees Celsius (approximately 64 degrees Fahrenheit). While it’s public knowledge that automakers in the EU are allowed to kill the emissions control systems on their diesel vehicles in cold weather to prevent damage to the engine, it seems that “cold” has not been properly defined, and car engineers are taking advantage of that fact.

According to the BBC, Emissions Analytics tested 213 cars from 31 manufacturers and found that “millions of vehicles could be driving around much of the time with their pollution controls partly turned off.” Apparently, cars that adhere to the Euro 5 emissions control standard (which was announced in September 2009 but became mandatory in January 2011) are among the worst offenders. The more current Euro 6 cars did better on Emissions Analytics’ tests but also showed discrepancies at relatively warm temperatures.

While turning off the emissions control system can have benefits for the longevity of a diesel engine, it also can improve the car’s miles-per-gallon rating. That creates a tension between priorities—a car might release more NO_x but get better gas mileage, cutting down on carbon dioxide (CO₂) emitted. But NO_x is a potent greenhouse gas, too, and auto manufacturers might be motivated to hide how their cars cause pollution by favoring a high mpg number while the car is still belching toxic NO_x in order to market their cars to environmentally conscious customers.

(credit: C-SPAN)

If there's anything that members of Congress can agree on, it's that they can't agree on anything. So on Wednesday, Democrats took to the House floor to stage a sit-in and protest their GOP counterparts' refusal to consider gun control legislation in the wake of the recent Orlando mass shooting.

The GOP's response was to cut the C-SPAN feed of the floor protest. House Speaker Paul Ryan, who controls the House C-SPAN feed, decided censorship was the proper route. But the C-Span feed was quickly restored via Twitter-owned Periscope from Rep. Scott Peters, a Democrat from California. Here is Peters' feed. The video is spotty.

The Democrats are urging gun legislation to land on the House floor. Hopefully Peters' mobile phone has a big battery, as about 40 House Democrats vowed "to occupy the floor of the House until there is action."

(credit: Intel Free Press)

A mobile advertising company that tracked the locations of hundreds of millions of consumers without consent has agreed to pay $950,000 in civil penalties and implement a privacy program to settle charges that it violated federal law.

The US Federal Trade Commission alleged in a complaint filed Wednesday that Singapore-based InMobi undermined phone users' ability to make informed decisions about the collection of their location information. While InMobi claimed that its software collected geographical whereabouts only when end users provided opt-in consent, the software in fact used nearby Wi-Fi signals to infer locations when permission wasn't given, FTC officials alleged. InMobi then archived the location information and used it to push targeted advertisements to individual phone users.

Specifically, the FTC alleged, InMobi collected nearby basic service set identification addresses, which act as unique serial numbers for wireless access points. The company, which thousands of Android and iOS app makers use to deliver ads to end users, then fed each BSSID into a "geocorder" database to infer the phone user's latitude and longitude, even when an end user hadn't provided permission for location to be tracked through the phone's dedicated location feature.